


skeleton tree

by arbitrarily



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drinking & Talking, M/M, Post-Season/Series 03, Rough Sex, Yuleporn, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:27:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8881348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Cooperation is not the same thing as forgiveness. Billy trusts Flint to know that.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Skitz_phenom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skitz_phenom/gifts).



> Title is from the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song of the same name. 
> 
> The fic is set sometime in future, after Season 3 but before the start of the _Treasure Island_ narrative, and presumes certain events have already taken place to get the story to the _Treasure Island_ place (i.e., some sort of falling out with Silver). I adored your prompts and set out to write this as a desert island tale, but instead, somehow, wound up being unable to get these two out of their room at the inn. Perhaps a future installment will be necessary! That said, I hope you enjoy and you have a very, very Happy Holiday!

 

 

i.

He greets him with raised fists. 

Flint finds Billy in Savannah. The room at the inn where Billy is staying is small. It boxes the both of them in when the door slams shut behind Flint, his shoved weight making the door jump in its frame.

Billy meets him with immediate violence, an intensity to it he does not think he fully understands. He understands this much though: it feels good. It feels owed. It’s been a long time but Billy’s body still remembers the mechanics of a fight equally matched. He rears back when Flint’s own fist strikes out and he doesn’t fight the spark of satisfaction that comes when he catches Flint in the gut.

There is a crystalizing clarity when it comes to hatred, like cold fire. Billy has rarely, if ever, seen Flint this clearly.

 

 

Savannah: there is no other city in the colonies more receptive to the black flag. After Billy arrived he had holed up at the inn, not all that far from the infamous Pirate House. He wanted anonymity. He wanted to be alone. The night is hot and humid and there is threat of a tropical storm making landfall. Every pirate with a missing limb in the tavern below (and there were many) had bemoaned their aches and pains as evidence of weather. And amidst it all, there’s a brawl brewing in the heat, as predictable as phantom pains foretelling thunder and lightning.

Truth be told, Billy has waited for this, or if not waited, then knew it must be coming. Same as the old men down in the tavern and the riggers with a weather eye out on the horizon: he knew something was coming. That Flint would come.

He doesn’t know how Flint found him. He has Flint’s blood smeared on his split knuckles; he doesn’t think that matters now. 

 

 

The fight takes them to the floor, all grappling and gritted teeth, and Billy pulls Flint’s own dagger on him. It’s an act of uncharacteristic carelessness to allow Billy to get his hands on it. Unless – unless –

Billy has Flint under him, the dagger poised to deliver the killing blow. The dagger, the hand that clutches it, Billy himself: poised. The tip of it digs in right next to the leaping pulse in Flint’s neck, beads of blood spilling down. This is it. This is finally it. 

“Here’s your chance,” Flint says, raspy and taunting, his teeth stained with blood. Billy freezes and the point of the blade trembles against Flint’s skin. He meets his eye. “Go on then,” Flint says, as close to gentle as a man like him could be, as if his voice could guide Billy’s hand. Unless, Billy thinks, and he grips the dagger tighter. Unless it was intentional. Unless this is a test. 

“It's what you’ve wanted, isn’t it,” Flint says, his voice more familiar this time, more of that hard edge creeping back in, and Billy is sure of it now: it’s Flint who has control of this after all. 

Billy throws the dagger to the side and pulls back and off of Flint, a frustrated sound catching in his throat. He has wanted Flint dead. He can’t imagine a world without him in it. The clarity is gone. 

Billy hunches slumped beside Flint’s prone form. He can feel Flint looking at him, but Billy deliberately does not look at him. Nothing is said, not yet, as the both of them struggle to catch their breath. Billy’s ribs ache with each inhale. 

Billy is the first to rise, snatching up the half-empty bottle of rum mercifully untouched from the fight and he takes a purifying swig. He can hear the men who have taken to the street below, raucous and hungry for their own pound of flesh. Behind him, Flint stirs, and Billy glances back, watches him over his shoulder as he gets to his feet. 

Flint drops down into the lone chair the room offers. Everything is close in these quarters, the cheapest room the inn had on offer. Billy rubs at his mouth and his fingers come away bloodied. He takes a seat on the edge of the bed.

“Hell of a welcome there, Billy,” Flint says, and Billy would bet his life on it: he almost sounds amused. 

 

 

Billy left Nassau not long after Silver’s coup. And then, the three of them – Silver and Flint and Billy – had gone their separate ways as the war in Nassau violently reached its inevitable conclusion: civilization had found them. 

Flint and Billy sit in a silence that is far from mutual but rather an impasse. As if waiting for one to break, every interaction since his arrival a show of strength.

So Billy drinks and Flint watches him. Flint is the one to speak first. “Of all the men to drink himself alone to death in this squalor – never thought it’d be you, Billy.”

“That might be the kindest thing you have ever said to me,” Billy says, all rum-soaked mockery. The alcohol burns his split bottom lip. He rolls his shoulder; it feels good to ache like this again.

“Put the bottle down – I wish a word.”

Billy shakes his head. “You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore. You are free, however, to pick the bottle up and join me.” He’s not sure why, but Billy has a gut sense – the same he gets in the heat of battle, the same that has yet to steer him wrong – that it would be worse for him if Flint was to leave. That is as far as he will go to reckon with such a thought.

Even if Billy has said Flint will issue no commands in his quarters, he obeys when Flint beckons with his hand. He leans forward and he passes him the bottle. The distance between them is not great enough and Billy watches Flint’s throat as he swallows the cut-rate liquor.

“I have a proposition for you,” Flint says. His mouth is still bleeding; Billy’s is, too.

 

 

 

 

ii.

Billy has been at this inn for three nights now. Before Flint’s arrival, he had no exit strategy. He would stay until he felt the urge to leave.

He should’ve left. He never should have come here. He thinks this as he, against his better judgment, hears Flint out. 

“The Urca gold?” Flint says and Billy frowns. He doesn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t this. “I want to take it back.”

“You mean you wish to steal it?” It’s worse than he thought. Flint has gone mad. 

“I mean I wish to dig it up, take it, and rebury it elsewhere for safekeeping. I mean I do not trust where it currently rests.”

Insanity, Billy thinks. He holds out his hand and without comment Flint passes the bottle back to him. He takes a rough swig and for a moment lets himself focus only on the burn as it goes down. “And how exactly do you see that happening?” he finally asks. 

Flint sits in silence for a beat before he looks up at Billy. It’s not a concession writ across his face and it is certainly no apology, but it is something. “Why do you think I’ve come to you?”

“You don’t know how,” Billy says, as if it is a minor marvel. And it is: Captain Flint, out of ideas. Billy exhales heavily, cocks his head to the side as he considers both Flint and the plan. Plan – if it can even be called that. Despite himself, Billy’s mind begins to spin and calculate in Flint’s favor (and here is another truth of Billy he tries hard to disregard: he is never better than when he is plotting with Flint). “You would need a reason to get out to the island, where it’s buried.”

“That’s not the part that troubles me.” Flint pauses. “We have to find a way to steal away long enough to unearth the chest, return the chest to the ship, and then find a new locale to bury it, all with none other learning of our intentions.”

“Our intentions,” Billy repeats. He sloshes the rum in the bottle and stares down at it. “So you assumed my contribution.”

He doesn’t care for the studious way Flint looks at him. “I assumed you had seen what I had seen. That it’s what led you to hide away here.” Billy scowls at him. “And in that,” Flint continues, “you saw the error of your ways and would intend to make amends.”

Billy raises his eyebrows. “To you?”

“To the men. To Nassau. To anyone and everyone who comes to cross the path of the fearsome Long John Silver.”

Billy looks away from him. He drinks. He passes the bottle back to Flint for lack of anything else to do with his hands. With Flint. With himself. 

“You’d need a ship, too. A crew,” Billy says, his eyes fixed on the door. Flint, much like Billy, had lost everything when Nassau fell. When Silver betrayed him. It’s not that Billy forgets that, but rather he thinks he deserved it. 

Flint ignores him. “We would go under cover of night,” he says. “Dig it up, disguise it, bring it back to camp, have the men bring it onto the ship none the wiser, and when the time is right, we find a new island, a new burial plot.”

Billy snaps his head towards Flint. “Which ship? What crew? You’d need men you could trust, men who either have never heard of Captain Flint or men who so feared him they’d do anything you said. You couldn’t use any of the old crew, and that’d be if you could pry them from Silver or the grave, and trust, they would’ve been your best bet. You dig a chest up and you bring it aboard a ship – what the fuck do you suppose they’ll think? Treasure. That’s the only thing worth digging for, and men go bloodthirsty where potential personal wealth is concerned. You of all men should know this.”  
  
“Are you finished?” Flint snaps. Flint fills the pause by drinking, a faraway look on his face. “So then, in your infinite wisdom, what would you suggest?”

Billy is quiet while he thinks. There are too many variables. They are assuming Silver hasn’t already come for the gold. There are too many factors that exist outside the both of them, and that’s assuming Billy can trust Flint. The men have grown louder on the street below, the brawl finally breaking, and Flint rises to close the shutters against them. Billy watches him. He can’t trust him. He imagines the great danger in going after that treasure, the danger already endured to procure it. The danger he will invite into his life, that he already has by entertaining Flint’s presence here in his room. He has come to find a mild bit of peace in his travels alone, here in Savannah, neither earned nor deserved and scarcely sober, but it is his. 

“We’d have to do all the work ourselves,” he says quietly. “The less who know, the less who can betray. The less who need dealing with.” He pauses, deliberately, sure that Flint understands. Billy hardly thinks either of them have gone soft, but he has to be as sick of unnecessary death as Billy is. “We go out to that island, assuming you are still able to treat with the Maroons, without Silver by your side. But let’s say you can. We go out there, the entire crew. You’ll invent the reason why. Or – you want to treat with Madi, with whoever it is in charge, now that our ranks have changed. You want to make clear to them you are still invested in every promise you made, that you still have men who sail under your banner and your name, and regardless of the role Silver has come to play in this, yours has not changed.” Flint’s face is unreadable but attentive as he listens to Billy.

“Amidst all this,” Billy says, “I steal away. I dig up the gold. I have it waiting for you and together, we row it out to the ship, dead of night. We disguise it in the hold – no, we keep it in your quarters. Keep it aboard, keep it secret, keep it unknown. You sleep in there – I can’t imagine a man fool enough to attempt a break-in, and that’s assuming any of the crew learns there’s anything worth investigating and worth crossing you for in the first place. All goes according to this fool’s errand of a plan, they’ll never be the wiser the chest was even brought aboard.”

“And then?” Flint’s face is still unreadable, but Billy knows: he has him.

“And then. We bide our time. We find a new location. We cast anchor and come ashore. And we bury it.” He notices how he says the word _we_. That he has inserted himself into the narrative. It is not his intention; he knows it will not have gone unnoticed by Flint. 

Flint arches an eyebrow. “And you don’t imagine that during this laborious process not a single man will ask a single question?”

“No. I’m depending on it.” He looks Flint dead in the eye. “It gives you an opportunity to exert your will. We’ll need to build up a new crew. The numbers who followed you off the _Walrus_ aren’t nearly enough to man a crew, least of all one planning to go up against Silver. It gives you an opportunity to remind them of who you are and where they are. You are not Silver and you are not Teach and you’re certainly not Jack Rackham. Your power is of a different sort, and if the men need to be reminded of that – and they will – that is your chance. You tell them – you show them: you are not diminished.”

Flint stares at him and Billy stares back. “I hardly recognize you.”

Billy frowns. “Beg pardon?”

Flint shakes his head and he looks away from Billy. He says, his voice quiet, the sound of the outside world distant and unreachable, “We cannot leave it buried where it is now. I need you to understand that.”

Billy thinks of the mess left behind in Nassau, of the horror and the bodies left in the wake of Long John Silver, the best-loved and most fearsome pirate to sail the high seas. Billy never thought it would be Silver who would be the one to catch up to Flint, to make him pay. Just how far and dark his shadow he had helped to craft would cast. Or maybe he did. Maybe there was a part of him who saw that glimmer of possibility, and be it intentional or not, it has been a long con since then to see this moment to fruition. He thinks that gives himself far too much credit.

“I understand that much. I do,” Billy says. “But you understand you’re fucking over not just Silver, but Jack, and Anne, and Charles Vane, and everyone who worked so hard to retrieve it in the first place. Everyone still alive who’s owed a piece of it will come for you, if they are not coming for you already. I was prepared to kill you the moment I saw you.”

“No,” Flint says. “You weren’t.” He flashes his teeth, not quite a smile. He crosses his legs, relaxes into his chair. “I suppose we’ll just have to make sure no one knows it was us.”

Billy holds his gaze and he feels every old resentment flare up inside of him, harsh and familiar. “Us,” he repeats, caustic. He lunges, the distance between the bed and Flint easily closed, and snatches the bottle back up. He takes another long swig of the rum as he settles back onto the bed. “I have agreed to nothing. Tell me – why would I ever do this for you?” Throughout this entire conversation, Billy has anchored himself by believing this merely hypothetical. But it’s another lie he has attempted to mold into a truth. The dark thought looms in the back of his mind that if he should refuse, then he is little more than a loose end for Flint. He knows of Flint’s intentions, but then, he always has; this is his blessing and his curse. 

Merely hypothetical; Billy is a liar. In his head, he has already charted how this could work for them: how they could spirit the gold out towards the Indian Ocean, the small islands there. They could change ships at a port in West Africa. Make their travel on a trader down through the Magellan Strait – plenty of crews traveled through there, plenty who bartered coin for silence and a blind eye. They’d disembark at the Horn of Africa, find themselves another trading ship bound for India.

Flint has yet to reply. For the first time in a long time, Billy feels certain. He feels like control is almost within his grasp. “You presume my involvement, but first you must ask for it,” he says.

He recognizes the exasperation, the impatience, in Flint’s eyes. He watches him clasp his hands between his legs and lean forward. “Billy,” he says. “What I am asking is for you to give back what you owe Nassau, and to do so, you – ”

“No,” Billy says, solid. Unshakeable. “Give me a better reason.” His gaze does not leave Flint. He wants to see if he will squirm. “I want to hear you say it. I want you to tell me that you need my help.”

“You wish me to beg?” Flint all but spits that final word.

“If that’s what it feels like in your mouth, then yes. By all means. Beg me.”

He wonders how often it comes to pass that another man instructs Flint as to what to do. He imagines the rate of appeasement numbers even less. 

The heat in the room with the shutters closed borders on unbearable. He can feel sweat pricking its way down his back, his shirt sticking to him. He waits for Flint to speak. It takes him a good moment, as if in that scant time he has rearranged his anticipated script. Billy listens as he fails again, as he couches it, again, in talk of the greater good.

“We have a duty,” Flint says.

“No,” Billy says again. “Not like that. Unvarnished.” He cannot bring himself to say _honest._ He fears it is not a real truth he seeks but rather one he can believe in. It’s the curse of any author: all stories become fictions when you know to look for the hand beneath the tale.

Flint’s face is flat but dark. “Billy,” he says, and it’d be a mockery if not for the tightness of his mouth, everything about him carefully rigid and drawn. Like a great expense has been exacted here. “I am asking for your help. I am telling you I need you.”

Billy’s mouth twitches. There’s satisfaction to be found here, but also something worse. 

“It cannot be done alone,” Flint says when Billy does not reply. “I need you.” 

And is that all it takes for him? Billy believes he means it. He chooses to hear truth.

So it is a violent but tenuous peace to be achieved between them. Billy doesn’t understand his own story, that he will always be tied to Flint, not out of destiny or fate but of Billy’s own design. Because he says yes to him when he asks. Because he was always going to say yes.

“It would appear I am all yours then,” Billy says. He leans back on the bed, limbs sprawled. A practiced mirage of careful calm.

“Billy,” Flint says. Mocking now, sinister as ever. As if all he knows to do with a body this close to his own is aim to bleed. He leans forward; he takes the bottle back. “You have always been mine to command.”

 

 

 

 

iii.

The first lessons Billy can recall learning are: his numbers, his letters, _If a man does not repent, He will sharpen His sword_ , the blow of a curled fist as it smarts against the raised ridge of his cheekbone, that dissent fosters change, that injustice will stand unless given a voice, that _He has bent His bow and made it ready._ That one man cannot belong to any other.

 

 

 

 

iv.

You tried to kill me but you failed to finish the job. It’s what Billy wants to say to Flint – it’s what he’s wanted to say, all defenses to the contrary aside – but instead he drinks more.

They drink. They talk, or they attempt to. There is too much history to fill in the space of this one room and this one conversation. The room feels smaller now, with them both in it. In the quiet that crops up around them as they pass the dwindling bottle of dark rum back and forth, Billy justifies this to himself. He tells himself that they are together merely out of necessity. Out of less desirable options. That they aren’t even together at all. It’s the same justification Billy had used before he returned to Nassau and named Silver their king. History, Gates used to like to say, has a funny way of repeating itself when a man’s too foolish to recognize the time has come for a man to change his ways. 

Billy knows: he needs to stop writing the same story. He needs to tell a different one.

Billy is afraid to pull at the string that holds his hate together. Afraid of what might unravel from it. “It’s personal to you,” Ben Gunn had said to him, and that was a long time ago and Billy doesn’t think of him much, he doesn't think of any of them much, the same way he doesn’t think through his hate.

He had denied it then – _it’s personal to you_ – but seated across from Captain Flint himself, he finds he lacks the energy to argue otherwise, if only to himself.

 

 

When Billy had come back from the dead, Flint had looked at him not as a man he had once known nor as a ghost, but as a potential adversary. It was the closest thing to respect Billy had ever commanded from him. He had liked that. 

 

 

“It’s a bit difficult to be angry at the monster you created.” Flint says it only after Silver inevitably surfaces in their halting conversation. Long John Silver ghosts around them much as he does every pirate who has sought shelter here in Savannah. _It’s personal to you_ , Billy thinks but does not say, does not ask after Flint’s motivations for the gold. He has the bottle in his hand but it is mostly empty now. 

“I don’t find that to be true at all,” Billy says.  He offers the bottle to him. 

“I’m still not entirely sure why you did it,” Silver had said, back when Silver and Flint had returned to Nassau. When an unbalanced, shaky truce had been forged amongst all three of them. “And I’m not sure if you expect my gratitude.” The cold, closed-off way he said it was something new and Billy found he did not care for it.

“It was nothing personal,” Billy said, watching the gentle rise and swell of the sea. 

“Oh, believe me, I have learned to take nothing you men say to heart – nor the grave, for that matter.” Billy could hear the smirk in Silver’s voice.

“You must truly hate him. Flint. To place your trust in me.” Silver laughed then, and Billy looked at him over his shoulder. It had nothing to do with trust, he did not say.

 

 

 

 

v.

“If we are to succeed, I am going to need you to trust me.” Flint sets the bottle down on the table beside him. Billy’s head snaps up; nothing about Flint gives him away. Billy wonders how long he has waited out the silence and the rum to say it. 

“I’ve given you my acquiescence,” Billy says, each word drawn and stitched up tight. “That is all you will receive from me. My trust? My forgiveness? Is not on offer.”

There is a flicker across Flint’s face. It’s not surprise nor is it disappointment. Billy thinks it matches his own. Billy has always wanted to be Flint’s equal, more than he has wanted to be his end. He wants to be an equal but he can’t trust him. He doesn’t think he trusts anyone. But Flint does. Despite everything. He trusted Silver. And now he wants to trust him, or at the least, he wants his trust. Billy doesn’t know if that’s a product of arrogance or foolishness or a third thing he won’t allow himself to name.

“Forgiveness,” Flint repeats. He rises to hand as if to hand the bottle back to Billy, but that does not happen. Instead he rises, approaches, and leaves the bottle on the table. Billy looks up at him from his perch on the side of the bed.

“You hate me that much.” Flint says it softly, nearly impartial, like it’s not him as the object of Billy’s hate but a different man. Like it’s a curiosity, fascinating that he could provoke such an extreme reaction. Or it’s not the reaction alone, but it’s Billy.

“Does it matter?” Billy had meant to snarl it, give him all bite, but instead it comes out too quiet, mournful even, like something he has already lost. “You got what you wanted from me.”

Billy has seen that look on Flint’s face so rarely: it’s contemplative, belying a past life rife with its own hurt. He looks like he wants to tell Billy how wrong he is – the familiar cornerstone of their relationship, such as it is. It feels foreign to him now though, as if they have tread upon undiscovered territory. But why would he argue, why would it matter what Billy thinks of him. The same reason you made him beg, Billy thinks. That’s why.

It should not come as any surprise then when Flint closes the distance between them.

 

 

Flint kisses like he has an argument to win – in earnest, demanding, as if he is all you are meant to need. 

Billy can taste the dark rum in Flint’s mouth, Flint’s face hot against his, as drunk as he is and open. Neither trait makes Flint appealing to Billy, but at the same time, at the same time he is kissing him back, he is pushing himself into that openness. His mouth on Flint’s sobers him up, Billy can see it, the sharpness of his gaze, that careful glint to him.

Like everything genuine and hard-won between them, it’s bred from physical violence. A dark inevitability to it all – the taste of blood and rum gone dulled and flat in each other’s mouths, shared between them, made impossible to differentiate. Billy’s hand covers Flint’s jaw, his thumb pushing in to graze the corner of Flint’s mouth. He can feel the heat of him as his mouth presses open and wet over his own.

This, Billy thinks, is the most perverse way possible for them to forge a treaty. A truce. A blood oath, as Flint’s teeth find the dip between his neck and shoulder and he bites. All of this bred from the same impulse as Billy’s fists crashing into Flint’s jaw when he came through that door: this is what you have done to me and this is what I will do to you. 

The two of them rut against each other on the rumpled bed that Billy has been sleeping in, their hips rubbing against each other, seeking a fulfillment neither has ever known how to ask for. It feels wrong to witness this much vulnerability in Flint, this much undisguised want; it only makes Billy crave more. The only times that Billy has seen him lose that tight leash of his control, it resulted in violence. But this is violence of a different, more intimate, stripe, all teeth and rough hands, the punishing press of one body into the other, trying to find a way for them to fit together.

He palms at Flint’s cock clumsily through his trousers, but that’s still enough for Flint to hiss through his teeth, grab at Billy’s wrist and simply hold him there, his hand pressing as Flint grinds against it. Flint fits his thigh between Billy’s legs and Billy rubs himself against it, his hips rising and falling, breath escaping in quiet huffs against Flint’s open mouth. Their knees knock into each other, brute strength matched, working against and for each other. They are together out of necessity, Billy thinks again.

The room is too warm, their bodies the same, and their clothes stick to sweat-damp skin. They drag them off themselves, off each other, in between the crash and collision of their mouths, sloppy spit-slick lips and clutching, demanding hands doing the job of words that have gone long unsaid. 

Billy has Flint’s cock in his hand and he pushes his own against him, watches Flint's eyes flutter closed and then determinedly open, the tic at his jaw, like he’s trying to marshal whatever small pieces of control he has left. He must find it: he pushes Billy back down onto the mattress and Billy is either too rum-addled or keyed up to react quickly enough. Flint’s mouth drags down his chest, his stomach, muscles bunching beneath, until just as suddenly as all this began, he is taking Billy’s cock into his mouth. Billy makes a sound as if gut-shot. He tries to rise up from the bed, but Flint is faster: he pushes him back down. He holds him down, swallows him down. Billy’s fists curl into the sheets, his eyes squeezed shut. 

And then Flint makes him roll over, his hand still on Billy's cock, harsh strokes, like there’s a point to prove here, Flint reactionary as always. Billy cooperates, he goes with it, like this is any other thing he needs to see through (a lie, another lie, his justifications grow thinner yet). He feels the bite of Flint’s teeth against the curve of his ass, and Billy grunts, thrusts against the mattress and Flint's trapped hand, and he hears what sounds like a low chuckle from Flint, and Christ, this is happening. This is really happening.

 

 

He hears Flint spit before he feels it, the drip of it. Billy sucks in a breath, knowing this will be rough, wanting it that way. He thinks it’s Flint’s thumb that he rubs against his asshole, barely breaching him, but it’s enough to make Billy’s back arch. It’s both surreal and all too real; he can’t escape the impossibility, the reality, that it’s Flint. It’s Flint who has brought him here, Flint’s body on his, in him. Flint rubs at him first – his hole down, pulling at his balls and then his cock, pre-come sticking to Flint’s fingers, and it’s with that and his spit that he presses his finger, first one and then two, into him.

Billy’s breath comes ragged, like he can’t catch it, doesn’t want to or need to, not with Flint behind and against him, his fingers fucking inside of him, working him open. Each drag of Flint’s free hand over his cock is enough to make him drop his head, tremble that much more.

It’s been a long time since Billy has been the one fucked and not the one fucking. Of course, he tries to think ruefully, always about what Flint wants. It’s what he tries to tell himself. He thinks maybe Silver understood that better and first. Or, Gates. He can’t think of Gates, not here, not like this. It feels like a betrayal in the strangest way possible. Like he should hate Flint more for what he has done. To Gates, to him, to the men. But here he is, bent over for him. He can’t even say it’s just about Flint, about what he wants, not when Billy feels like his skin’s pulled too tight over his bones, like he can’t remember the last time anyone touched him like they meant it.

Like he means it. The heat in the room has grown to stifling, both their bodies slick with sweat when Flint pushes the head of his cock against him. Flint’s breath has gone shallow. Billy wonders what it’d be like to fuck him. What it would be like to have their positions reversed. It makes something terrible lurch inside of him that’s not entirely composed of lust.

Billy’s fingers clutch white-knuckled into the sheets, overwhelmed as Flint fills him, the burn of flesh on flesh and it makes all of him ache. Billy bites at his own forearm to stifle the noises rising out of him, feeling impossibly stretched and over-full, and he hears Flint mutter, “fuck,” behind him. Billy clenches, gasps wetly. With a low moan, he starts fucking back onto Flint, desperate (to come, to prove himself, to match him).

Flint isn’t loud when he fucks, but each gasp and cut-off sound that leaves him strikes Billy as an admission against his will. Needful, and self-loathing for it. Billy pushes his hips back onto him, a wild cry of his own breaking from him, and then Flint’s hand is grasping at the nape of his neck, pushing him down and pulling him back to him, somehow both, somehow simultaneous. “Yes,” Flint says, and they’re not arguing anymore, Billy thinks, not here. Not like this.

Billy almost regrets that he can’t see Flint. He wants to know what he looks like inside of him. If he can unmake Flint just as much as he feels unmade now, beneath him, full of him, choking on words he will never be able to say. It’s better this way, he will think, later. It’s better he did not see his face.

“I’m,” Billy starts and then stops, like he can’t form the words. Flint’s hand covers the nape of his neck, too heavy, too possessive to be considered a comfort. He pushes Billy down harder against the bed.

“You what?” Flint says, but he sounds just as wrecked as Billy feels. It’s better not to see him. It’s safer.

Billy doesn’t know what he is, what he was going to say. He opens his mouth and the only thing that comes out is a wordless groan as Flint fucks in deeper. He can’t think. Can’t consider consequences. Not now. He can’t think how irrevocable it is that Flint owns even this much of him; he can’t consider how the inverse might be true as well. He doesn’t think, impossible, his body pulled taut as a bowstring at its breaking point, and if he says something, if he says a name, when he comes he does not think about that either.

Teeth sink into the meat of his shoulder when Flint comes, silent and heavy.

 

 

It’s the same as a loss for Billy to admit it: Flint was right. The only way forward with Flint is one of trust. It’s either hand-in-hand or hand around the throat. There is no in-between.

They leave Savannah together the following day. 

 

 

 

 

vi.

Billy had returned from the dead. Now he sat before Flint’s desk aboard the _Walrus_ as Hornigold’s men searched for them. Official matters discussed, and Billy could see there was more Flint wanted to say. It happened more and more often, like Flint had yet to move past the question of Billy’s presence amongst his men. He gave voice to that now.

“I never much understood it – why you’ve stayed on so long. I’m sure you had offers. Vane wanted you for his crew.” That small smile of Flint’s grew, diminished just as quickly. Billy betrayed nothing. “I remember, and this was years and years ago, he wanted me to bet you in a game of cards.” Billy wasn’t quick enough to suppress his surprise. He felt like he was on unstable ground here, shifting sands. Flint grinned again, his smile wider now. “I declined, if you’re curious. Told him I was never much good on the draw, which is true. I would have been essentially handing you over to him. Besides, Gates would have had my head.”

“You and Gates,” Billy started, his voice stuck in his dry throat, the words slow coming. He offered his own small smile for lack of anything else. “You’re both all I’ve known in this world. The one I live now, the one that counts. The living world.” He couldn’t bring himself to say that with Gates gone, that meant it was only Flint he had.

“Don’t stay out of any misplaced loyalty, Billy.” The low tone of Flint’s voice was a warning.

“It’s not,” he said. He could hear the quiet stubbornness in his voice and he knew that Flint could, too.

Flint stood. He came around the other side of his desk, headed for the door. He gripped Billy’s shoulder, the bite of sore muscle between neck and shoulder, and squeezed once. Billy wanted to lean into it, lean into him. He didn’t understand the impulse and he fought it, didn’t want to probe it any deeper, afraid of what he might find. But he did know better than to trust anything where Captain Flint was concerned. He learned that a long time ago. He reminded himself of Mr. Gates. He remembered the cold shocking crash of the sea slicking against the hull of the Andromache. The only part of him that moved were his hands; they trembled. A weakness, so he clenched his hands into fists.

“Alright then,” Flint said. The weight of his hand disappeared. He left without a word, leaving Billy alone, on the other side of the desk – might as well be the other side of the shore. Billy sat there, listening to the groan and the noise of the ship, the men who called it home. He didn’t think he was one of them anymore. Not under this captain.

 

 

 

 

vii.

It is Billy’s idea and they sail east. They carry the chest amongst varying trading ships, hiding their trail through forged names and forged manifests. And then the island, their island, and perhaps their end. Their boat reaches the shore taking on water, a minor wreck. Their small vessel is dashed along the shore; the chest they carry is full of gold.

He had meant to leave him behind. Now, he is dragging him ashore. The story – their story – ends, it starts, with a shipwreck. They have the chest and they have their lives (though of the two, Billy is certain which Flint values more). It’s a spit of an island out in the Indian Ocean, uninhabited. For now, Billy thinks. The world, civilization, is broadening its reach, finding untold footholds to claim as its own.

“Can you imagine,” Flint grumbles, squinting down the beach to their half-submerged boat. “Captain Flint meets his end, shipwrecked and marooned, with enough gold to establish his own petty kingdom. Now, there’s a legacy.”

Billy is deliberately rough with the wound he treats across the palm of Flint’s dominant hand.  I tried to imagine a future without you in it, Billy does not say. It is the truth, but it is also true that he was unable to imagine a future at all. Why not this one.

“They’re all just stories anyway.”

 

 

His shovel strikes against the packed sandy dirt. He begins to dig.

 

 

 


End file.
